What Did Ancient Humans Do When Someone Died? Who Found the Body First?

What did ancient humans do when someone died? The bones from caves across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East hold the real answer, and it changes from cave to cave, sometimes from one grave to the next inside the same cave. For most of human history, a dead body was contested ground. Hyenas, cave lions, and cave bears wanted the exact same shelter humans did, and a corpse left in the open was an invitation. Some caves show a body covered fast enough that not one tooth mark ever reached it. Other caves show the opposite: cut marks, bones cracked open for the marrow inside, and a skull turned into something nobody expects to find. Two forensic signatures separate an animal's meal from a human funeral, and once you can read them, you can read almost any cave in this story like a police report. A single percentage decides whether a body was buried or left to the scavengers. A single grave decides whether the world-famous "flower burial" everyone has heard of is even real. This video walks the caves where those two answers collide: a pit dug into bedrock, a family processed like game, a skull built into a drinking cup, and two children buried in beads that took a community ten thousand hours to make. Sources: Rendu and colleagues (PNAS), Bello and colleagues (PLOS ONE and Journal of Human Evolution), the Sima de los Huesos excavation reports (CENIEH), Defleur and colleagues (Science), Hunt and colleagues (Journal of Archaeological Science), Nadel and colleagues (PNAS), Martinón-Torres and colleagues (Journal of Human Evolution), Janssens and colleagues (Journal of Archaeological Science), Trinkaus and Buzhilova (Antiquity), the Smithsonian Human Origins Program